Wednesday, December 5, 2007

I decided to dive head-first into the Masters of Horror series and started with "Jenifer". The screenplay was written by Steven Weber, and he also stars in the episode (these MOH things are less than an hour long -- like little mini-movies)
So it begins -- two police officers are eating some Chinese food on a quiet road when they hear screaming and commotion. Detective Spivey (Weber) goes flying out of the car just in time to save a young woman from a man who is about to hack her up with a meat cleaver. When Spivey approaches the woman (Jenifer), he sees that although she has a gorgeous body, her face is hideously deformed (I am not exaggerating -- that face is fricken' crazy)
Spivey finds himself strangely attracted to Jenifer, and even goes so far as to take her from the mental institution she is being housed in and BRING HER TO HIS HOUSE IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT. Obviously his WIFE (??!!) and teenage son are not thrilled with this plan. They would also not be thrilled to discover that he begins sleeping with Jenifer behind his wife's back. The sex scenes are pretty graphic, and in fact, they had to cut some additional content out, due to being too racy for even Showtime. We soon discover that her issues are not limited to her f-ed up face, andn the ensuing action involves lots and lots of gore and an extremely strange decision on Spivey's part. The end is pretty shocking as well.
I liked this movie and it has inspired me to rent more of the MOH series. The nice thing about the less-than-an-hour running time is that there's none of the fluff and boring extra content that clouds up some full-length horror movies. It's just sixty minutes of pure horror goodness -- yummy.
Grade: B+ (Creature/friend in the basement in Evil Dead)